Alcman: Song and Love in Service to the City

In Sparta at the end of the 7th century bce, Alcman’s Partheneia show that female homoerotic desires and sentiments were worthy of being sung in public, and that they could participate in the construction of a common identity. The Partheneia are poems intended to be performed by young girls in the political and educational context of choral training.⁵ Alcman is likely to have been officially commissioned by the city of Sparta to compose these songs, which a female choir then publicly performed. The author creates verses for these young girls in which they celebrate the grace (charis) of those who direct their choral training, young women who arouse in them at once modesty, admiration, and erotic emotion.⁶ These songs, which we know by way of several long fragments (P. Louvre E 3320), characterize this emotion by describing the effects that erotic sentiment produces in the bodies of the young choristers. The force of eros strikes them, leaving them unsteady. Comparison with death, found in the works of other Archaic poets, confirms the erotic dimension of these evocations. This does not mean that the performers of the song truly or personally felt this love (it is rare, in any case, for the songs to express intimate emotions directly—Greek melic poetry is not lyric in the 19th-century sense). However, this does not detract from the importance of the documents. Quite the opposite: the evocation of heroic figures and great battles connected with Sparta’s mythical past (fr. 3, 1–39 ed. Calame) highlights the collective dimension of such choral practices and the civic values for which they serve as a vehicle. Far from being perceived as a private sentiment, silenced and kept secret in the deepest intimacy, erotic desire between female characters is considered capable of forging a bond and playing a role in the formation (paideia) of female members of the political community.

Sappho and Anacreon: Painful and Wonderful Eros

It is likewise through song—a social and political practice of extreme importance—that love between women is evoked in Lesbos. While Sappho’s poems (late 7th–early 6th centuries bce) sing the agonies of love in general, the majority of them celebrate the eros felt by one woman for another.⁷ In most of Sappho’s poems, the I is feminine, and it expresses love, already past or yet to come, for another woman, who is sometimes named (Atthis, Anactoria, Gongyla, Mnasidika, or Mika). The physical and psychological symptoms of love are evoked: trembling, murmuring, loss of voice (fr. 31), vertigo (P. Sapph. Obbink) and nausea (fr. 1), weak knees (fr. 58).⁸ The virtues of the young women are also described, along with departures, separations, radiant memories, and luminous hopes. The pragmatic approach to these poems, which takes into account the concrete performance of the songs through the study of enunciative indicators,⁹ underscores their collective, and not private, dimension.

A poem by Anacreon (fr. 358), whose ludic ambiguity has generated numerous commentaries, may also be linked with this erotic tradition: one possible reading of the poem is that a woman of Lesbos turns away from the amorous poet, preferring another woman instead. Whatever the case may be, nothing within the ensemble of melic poetry from the Archaic period expresses a difference in the nature of the desire that arises between two women, between a woman and a man, or between two men, and even less so the idea of a hierarchy of love based on normality or conformity to traditions, according to arguments made on moral grounds. In these songs, eros is the force whose very evocation can unite a community (within either the public context or that of symposia); it is also, paradoxically, the force that causes those whom it strikes to lose their bearings. Eros is neither limited to, nor experienced towards, only one gender, and female homoeroticism is one of its possible manifestations.

Erotic Image and Mythical Love

This perception of eroticism during the Archaic period, which neither distinguishes nor condemns amorous relationships between females, is corroborated by a representation on a polychrome plate from Thera, dating from the end of the 7th century bce.¹⁰ Two women, facing each other, exchange garlands: one touches the other’s chin in accordance with an erotic motif that is clearly identifiable and present in courtship scenes between women and men, or between men. It is difficult to generalize on the basis of a single image, but we can take note of the integration of this relationship into the positive context of a courtship scene depicted on an object intended for a banquet.

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Figure 1. Polychrome plate, c. 620 bce. Thera, Archaeological Museum.

In regard to myth, although there does not exist a female equivalent of the well-known loves between a god and a young mortal (e.g., Apollo and Hyacinthus), a motif of interest appears in the story of Callisto: according to one variation, attested by scholia on Hesiod and Aratos (see section “Asclepiades and Amphis: laughter without a hidden agenda”), Zeus adopts the guise of Artemis in order to engage in a sexual relationship with the goddess’s preferred companion. This variation also appears in sources from the Roman era (see section “Greek motifs for an erotic Latin poetry”).

In contemporary studies, the god–mortal relationship has been linked to the asymmetrical dimension of the educational or initiatory relationship.¹¹ Sappho’s poetry has sometimes been read this way, but without the emergence of any consensus. Sappho’s poems do not in fact reveal any noticeable age differences, nor any explicitly authority-based relationships, between fictional characters. The educational dimension of female relationships is articulated much later, in Plutarch at the beginning of the 2nd century ce: in his depiction of archaic Sparta, he underscores the importance of the educational model that the lover represents for the beloved, and draws a parallel between it and the relationship established between women (kalai kai agathai) and young girls (Life of Lycurgus, 17.8–9). This passage primarily bears witness to Plutarch’s interest in erotic relationships as capable of producing effects in the social and political domain, notably in Sparta. In reality, nothing permits us to deduce that an asymmetry similar to the one that some see in masculine “paederasty” is a valid social model of love between women (see in particular Parker, 1993).

Historical and Lexical Clarification: Sappho, Lesbos, and Female Homosexuality

The etymology of the current terms “lesbianism” (1870) and “Sapphism” (1890) has sometimes created confusion in the understanding of ancient narratives.¹² In antiquity, the name “Sappho” never actually implied this kind of love. For more than five centuries, Sappho was never made the object of any kind of moral reprobation as a result of the homoeroticism in her verses. The use of these verses in the masculine symposia of the Classical and Hellenistic periods confirms that this repertoire was integrated into the common culture. While Attic drama of the 5th and 6th centuries bce made her the lover, comically, of multiple men, the feminine loves sung in her poems are neither mentioned nor even mocked. During this same time period, the term lesbiazein appeared, meaning “to do as the people of Lesbos.” This term designated either, in a general way, denigrated sexual practices performed by a woman on a man, or, more specifically, fellatio; it can equally refer to a musical mode characterized as lascivious, but without any particular connection with the poet.¹³ It is only at the end of the 1st century bce, in Rome, that Sappho’s female loves (through assimilation of the poet and the persona cantans) are evoked, but without the figure of the poet becoming either an antonomasia or a marker of female homosexuality. As for the link between Lesbos as a geographic location and female homoeroticism, aside from Anacreon’s ambivalent poem this link does not appear until the 2nd century ce, in a text by Lucian, where it is used to characterize the place of origin of women who have relationships with other women. In this Dialogue of Courtesans, the connotation probably results from an implicit association not with the figure of Sappho but with a place known for its inhabitants being particularly skilled in sexual commerce. We find neither “lesbians” nor followers of “Sapphism” in antiquity.¹⁴

Love and Philosophy: The Extent of the Possible

It is in the context of a philosophical reflection on eros that there appears one of the rare—but no less important—mentions of love between women in the Classical period. In his Symposium, from the beginning of the 4th century bce, Plato sets the scene with guests who are praising eros. The character Aristophanes chooses to tell a bizarre story in which the cleaving of the three primitive beings—originally female, male, and androgynous spheres, each a single whole comprised of two complete people as they are today—is at the origin of the erotic forms of his time, each half being engaged in a search for its other half. He mentions the case of the female sphere, from which are descended women who are attracted to other women, and from which the hetairistriai originate (Symposium, 191d–e). This term, which appears here for the first time, cannot have the meaning of “homosexuals” because it does not designate all of the halves descended from the female being, but only the segment that is intensely attracted to women (the rest being merely attracted to women, without excess). Constructed from the verb hetairizein, which has the double meaning of “to be the companion of” and “to prostitute oneself,” the word was probably invented by Plato, in the style of the comic author Aristophanes. The definition of erotic desire offered by the fictional Aristophanes is intended, within the structure of Symposium, to culminate in Socrates’s discourse, which, through the female figure of Diotima, makes it clear that eros is a desire directed toward pure ideas and philosophy. The philosopher’s desire to stage an eros detached from sensory experience leads him to construct, through the character of Aristophanes, a preliminary overview of the erotic relationships that currently exist within human nature: in this panorama, erotic relationships between women are a possibility.

A few years later, in the context of a political reflection on eros, Plato once again places love between women on the same level as other desires. In the Laws, the Athenian proposes prohibiting amorous relationships between the youth (with no specification as to one’s sex) and “boys and girls” in order to regulate behaviour during competition, festivities, and sacrifices, and to promote harmony and the regulated planning of births (836a–b; see also 636b–d). Here there is no condemnation of homosexuality as such, and there is even less evidence of “homophobia”: sexual relationships between unmarried men and women are all equally forbidden. Within the framework of legislation for an ideal city, it is a question of regulating relationships to allow for order and to ensure the best transmission of heritage. Paradoxically, this interdiction provides a recognition of eroticism between women; in this context, such eroticism constitutes a desire liable to engender the same discords as other forms of love.¹⁵

Asclepiades and Amphis: Laughter without a Hidden Agenda

At the very end of the Classical period and during the Hellenistic period, there appear some mentions of erotic relationships between women. First and foremost among these is a play by Amphis (second half of the 4th century bce) which stages, in a comedy we know only through an outline (fr. 46 K.-A.), an Artemis who is vexed to learn that her favorite nymph, Callisto, is pregnant: the plot relies on a variant of the myth of Callisto, whom Zeus, disguised as Artemis, allegedly raped (see section “Erotic image and mythical love”). According to what can be gleaned from the outline, the comic aspect of the play rests upon the fact that the young girl declares that she has made love with the goddess and that, as a result, the latter is responsible for her pregnancy. Another occurrence, likewise humorous in tone, can be found in Asclepiades. The poet, in an epigram preserved in the Greek Anthology (5.207), presents a poet-character who is quite annoyed to see two women scorn his advances, only to leave together. An analysis of the construction of the character, who is identified with the poet’s own persona,¹⁶ allows us to distinguish a playful distance between the poet Asclepiades and his eponymous character (thus suggesting a poetic-ludic game, and not an anachronistic condemnation of homosexual relationships). In the context of epigrammatic love poetry, amorous relationships between women thus appear as an erotic possibility: indeed, in the 1st century bce, Meleager of Gadara chose to feature Asclepiades’s poem in his Garland.

These occurrences affirm what Plato’s texts allow us to think: during this time period, the ancients neither displayed disgust toward these types of relationships, nor considered them taboo. Aristotle, for example, has no qualms about describing the erotic behaviour that female doves engage in together (History of Animals, 560b–561a). What we witness is rather a lack of interest in such behaviour when it is judged outside a political context.

Images and Representations: Absence of Pornographic Motifs

A contemporary audience may be surprised to learn that in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, there is a near-total absence of images of sexual relationships between women, in particular the erotic and “pornographic” images that circulated on diverse objects during banquets. Vases depicting women in an intimate setting do exist,¹⁷ but this intimacy is principally suggested rather than depicted outright. For the Classical period, interpretations diverge concerning a small number of vases that, according to some, are explicitly erotic: these vases often show nude women brandishing a dildo (olisbos¹⁸). However, a simple study comparing these depictions with other similar images reveals that the olisbos and the phallic object are not markers of female homosexual activity¹⁹: they appear either in the context of group sex between men, or in the hands of, or near, women who are not making love to one another. An Attic kylix²⁰ showing a crouching woman extending her hand toward the genitals of another woman has sometimes been interpreted as a scene of lesbian sex, but comparisons of this image with scenes of depilation disproves this interpretation.

In light of the extreme rarity of images depicting erotic relationships between women, in comparison with the many vases representing couples of men or of men and women, it appears that female homosexuality was not a pornographic subject (in the current sense of the word). Gazing at two women making love to one another was not an erotic activity for those who used this pottery. Of course, these images do not allow us access to actual practices or knowledge of representations of free women (and even less of women of lower status); above all, they inform us about the tastes of the (male) citizens who frequented symposia.

Greek Motifs for an Erotic Latin Poetry

It is through the figure of the Greek poet Sappho that the first mentions of love between women appear in Roman poetry. While several passages of Horace or Ovid had established a link between Sappho and the love she expresses (Horace, Odes 2.13.24–25; Ov., Tr. 2.363–364), the Heroides explicitly formulate the type of relationship that, according to the Romans, Sappho had with the young girls of her country. In this collection of fictional letters exchanged between heroines and their lovers, Ovid gives voice to a Sappho in love with a young man, Phaon, who abandons her. The poet’s fictional character evokes her previous relationships with women in Lesbos (15.15–20). While even her character alludes to her bad reputation, the discourse is not condemning: Ovid makes Sappho into his poetic double, a model for the writing of desire and love.

This attention to love between women occurs twice more in the poet’s work, always as an echo of the Greek legends that the poet is reinventing. In his Metamorphoses, after describing a world in transformation and in which the genders of bodies remain fluid, Ovid takes up a mythic subject already used by Amphis in Attic comedy (see section “Asclepiades and Amphis: Laughter without a hidden agenda”), that of the nymph Callisto and Jupiter’s transformation into Diana in order to embrace her. Here, the poet depicts an embrace between a young woman and a goddess (Met. 2.409–440). This image is reutilized four centuries later in the verses of the Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis (2.120–124; 33.289–293; 36.66–74), and on a Roman simpulum found at Cullera, dating from the 4th century CE.²¹

Ovid likewise recounts the Cretan legend of Iphis (Met. 9.666–797), whose structural elements appear in the story of Leucippus, at Phaistos (Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses, 17, after Nicander), to which he adds an erotic element. It is the longest passage in Latin literature dedicated to female homoeroticism.²² When little Iphis is born, the mother leads everyone to believe that the child is a boy so that the father will not abandon the baby. This deception succeeds until the day Iphis encounters the beautiful Ianthe; the two women fall in love, but Ianthe does not know that Iphis is a woman. At the end of the story, Iphis is transformed into a man thanks to the intervention of the goddess Isis. However, while the initial plot mechanism is that of a simple misunderstanding resulting from cross-dressing, Ovid continually inflects the story’s logic. Highlighting the degree to which Iphis resembles a girl despite the circumstances and her upbringing, he explicitly portrays a situation of love between women. Iphis’s long monologue, tinged with desperation, is filled with rhetorical clichés that obstruct any lyrical or psychological interpretation. With this presentation, Ovid sets up the true metamorphosis that will transform this socially irresolvable situation: that of the relation—in the mathematical sense of the word—between the two women. The sex change is not an end but a means, the transformation of a cura prodigiosa into a Venus de more. Far from being a demeaning discourse, for the poet it is rather a question of giving an account, within the context of an etiological carmen describing the successive metamorphoses leading from chaos to the present day, of the social nonexistence of these relationships in the Augustan society to which he belonged.

A graffito found on the wall of a house in Pompeii (CIL IV, 5296) and dating from the end of the 1st century bce to the beginning of the 1st century ce reprises the Greek paraclausithyron (the lover’s desperate love song before the closed door of his/her beloved), in a poem featuring the voice of a woman addressing a beloved woman, referred to as pupula, “my darling.” ²³ Female homoeroticism is thus not totally excluded from the practice of Roman erotic poetry.

These references to Greece can certainly function to make such relations appear distant from normal practice in Rome²⁴ (as in satire, for example). To the extent that Greece is a motif that traverses the whole of Roman culture, however, particularly in the erotic domain where such references have a positive value,²⁵ they do not distinguish sexual relationships between women from other kinds of relationships. Nor do they make of them, in the poetic discourse of the Augustan age, a specific category.

Moral Norms and Juridical Preoccupations Concerning Adultery

One of the principal preoccupations to appear during the reign of Augustus was adultery, understood as a sexual relationship between a woman of free status and a man other than her husband. It is in the context of a fictional controversy intended as part of the training of future lawyers that Seneca the Rhetorician evokes this question, and appeals to the term tribades: he cites two Greek orators who apparently had the bad taste to mention the case of a husband who discovers his wife in bed with another woman, and then kills this intruder (Controversiae 1.2.23). The women themselves are not indicted; the question is whether or not the husband had the right to commit a murder. The text is full of gaps and its interpretation is not straightforward,²⁶ but it shows us that there were no Roman laws pertaining to adultery between women, seeing that the orators are unable to appeal to a causa legitima to defend the cheated-on husband.

This absence of juridical rules appears a century later in Petronius’s Satyricon: during Trimalchio’s banquet, one of the wealthy guests, Habinnas, publicly humiliates Fortunata, Trimalchio’s wife, when she and Habinnas’s wife Scintilla tightly embrace each other. In the context of this banquet parody, the women’s embrace allows Petronius to highlight the poor reading of the situation by a freed slave lacking in social understanding. The theme of the impossibility of adultery sans male appears soon after in Martial (1.90). In the context of this very brief scene, Petronius uses no specific term to characterize the two women, but does use implicit references to Plato’s Symposium, a work that mentions eros between women (cited in the section “Love and philosophy: The extent of the possible”).

Although the Controversiae are written in Latin, Seneca the Rhetorician cites in Greek the term tribades, in the plural, to designate the two women together. It is the first extant occurrence of the word tribas, constructed from the root of the Greek verb tribein (“to rub”). This term is attested in Latin in the first half of the 1st century ce, in the work of Phaedrus (Fables, 4.16), but as a transliterated Greek word, not regularized to Latin forms. In a fable playfully attributed to Aesop, the poet recounts the manner in which Prometheus sculpted humans. The tribades and the molles mares (literally, “soft or weak men”), result from an error in the application of the sexes to the bodies, which explains their deviant pleasure (pravo gaudio). The tone that emerges from Roman discourses between the 1st century bce and the 1st century ce becomes increasingly deprecatory.

The Condemnatory Discourse of Satire: Far from Eroticism

The satirical epigrammist Martial, at the end of the 1st century ce, alludes to sexual practices between women through two very different characters. His poems are extremely crude, but no more so than his poems that mock, in abundant scabrous detail, fellators, performers of cunnilingus, men who enjoy being penetrated, and all of the hypocrites of the era. In epigram 7.67, Philaenis, a character who comprises multiple aspects of the anti-erotic woman, accomplishes various athletic exercises after having sodomized young boys, then practices cunnilingus in an unrestrained manner on young girls. Philaenis, elsewhere referred to as the “tribas of tribades” (7.70.1), performs in excess acts that she believes to be virile. It is above all her hypersexuality and bad judgement that Martial ridicules: respectable Roman masculinity resides in measured comportment and in the appropriate judgement of what behaviour is best suited to the circumstances, and not in a specific sexual practice—especially not in cunnilingus. Martial’s other character, Bassa (1.90), seems at first to be the opposite of Philaenis: she, the most chaste of wives, maintains her decency by only visiting with women. In reality, however, she is their fututor and commits the astounding act of adultery without the involvement of a man. The comic effect of this epigram rests in the paradox of its final satirical twist, and the surprise generated by this character whose physical appearance in no way hints at her sexual practices. Bassa is not athletic, nor is she masculine; it is her behaviour and hypocrisy that are highlighted by Martial. Around the same time, the narrator of Juvenal’s sixth satire recounts, as a means of denouncing the turpitude and decadence of his time, the dubious behaviour of two drunk women, Maura and Tullia, who “take turns sitting astride one another in the moonlight” (Satires, 6.306–313). Far from occupying a category unto themselves or incarnating the contemporary image of the virile homosexual or butch lesbian, Martial’s and Juvenal’s characters make up part of the vast gallery of portraits produced by the two poets as they ridicule all—and they are many—of those who have not grasped the codes of Roman decency.

The true commonality shared by these evocations, from that of the fabulist Phaedrus to that of Juvenal, is their derogatory tone: the women are drunk or immoderate, and they transgress, by their general attitude, the moral norms of good behaviour. In these contexts, such sexual relationships are objects of blame, and those who surrender to them, far from arousing the desire of the work’s intended audience, offer a degraded image of themselves. Indeed, with the exception of a heavily damaged fresco from Pompeii’s suburban baths,²⁷ and some images on oil lamps, representations of sexual relationships between women are nearly nonexistent in the context of the erotic and “pornographic” images of wall paintings and banquet ceramic ware.

Scientific and Classificatory Discourses: Practices rather than Identities

The Latin term tribas is employed three times by Martial to characterize the same person. A word constructed from a Greek root, it first occurs in Latin contexts (Seneca the Elder, Phaedrus, Martial) and it is only later, in the 2nd century ce, that it appears in a Greek text: the astrological treatises of Ptolemy and of Vettius Valens mention the birth of masculine tribades and effeminate kinaidoi, according to a particular stellar configuration. These same subjects recur in the 3rd and 4th centuries (Manetho, Firmicus Maternus, and Hermes Trismegistus, who use the Latin term fricatrix). These authors are not concerned, however, with explaining the origin of “homosexuality”: the cases of men and women afflicted with deviant genders are never approached jointly, their deviations are also manifested in their social behaviour, and the same expectation is not applied to both partners in the relationship, whom our modern society would consider “homosexuals.” Moreover, the terms tribas, frictrix (Tertullian), and fricatrix have meanings that fluctuate according to context.

This fluctuation can also be observed in other scientific texts, in the absence of the term tribas. Artemidorus, in his Oneirocritica, posits the possibility of dreams in which a woman fantasizes that she penetrates another woman or is penetrated by her (1.80): these dreams are placed in the category of relationships that are contrary to nature (para phusin), which include sexual relationships with a cadaver, a god, or an animal, for the very reason of their social illegibility. They can be a good omen for the dreamer if the two women know each other. In a physiognomic treatise from the 4th century ce (Anonymous, Treatise on Physiognomy, 85), women who are attracted to other women are “of the feminine type.” Finally, the first medical text to mention sexual relationships between women is particularly late, dating from the 5th century ce (Caelius Aurelianus, On Chronic Diseases, 4.9.132–133). The abnormal behaviour is analysed as a mental dysfunction. For many centuries and up until this date, doctors did not view women’s sexual practice as pertaining to a typology of sexual practices, but rather as a reproductive capacity or, potentially, in terms of a crippling hypersexuality. Not a single known medical text from the Classical period mentions abnormality in the homosexual practices of women, and even less so a physical deformation of the clitoris that could supposedly be linked to sexual orientation.

The Magic of Love in Hellenistic Egypt

In a very different context, magical charms found in the sands of Egypt (on lead tablets or papyrus) portray the ravages of love and attest to the diverse means by which one managed to live out one’s desire. The practice of erotic magic involves a client and a magician who is asked, for payment, to write a magical charm to bewitch the person of one’s choosing. The papyrus or the tablet was generally thrown into the tomb of the invoked deceased while the magician stuck pins into a small statue or a doll according to the body parts named. A papyrus from the 2nd century ce, found at Hawara (PGM XXXII), contains a charm intended to unite two women, Sarapias and Herais. On a lead tablet found at Hermopolis (PSI I, 28, 12–19) and dating from the 3rd or 4th century ce, there is a long inscription: the divinities are invoked so that Gorgonia will burn with love and desire for Sophia, and will surrender herself to her. Within the corpus of erotic magic, whether charms are meant to unite two women, two men, or a man and a woman, the love that consumes and brings suffering is expressed in the same terms.

Lucian, the Play of Clichés, and the Shadow of Plato

One finds these sorts of varied and contradictory images, deliberately and skillfully collected, in a work of vastly different tone: the Dialogues of the Courtesans, composed by the master of allusion, erudition, and humour, Lucian of Samosata (2nd century ce). He presents us with a courtesan, Leaina, who is telling her colleague Klonarion the story of the evening that she spent with the rich Megilla of Lesbos and Demonassa of Corinth (Dialogue 5). Initially there as a citharist, she becomes the guest of this couple of “married” women,²⁸ who invite her to spend the night. This gives rise, she tells, to caresses and deep kisses between the three women, then, in the course of a full embrace, a dialogue on the sexual identity of Megilla. The latter shows Leaina her shaved head, which she hides under a wig. She asks to be called Megillos, but she explains that she is neither in drag like Achilles, nor a hermaphrodite, nor the product of a sexual metamorphosis like Tiresias. There follows an erotic relationship in which Megilla takes extreme pleasure. Leaina refuses to respond to Klonarion, who insistently demands details, and the dialogue ends with this aporia. Contemporary commentaries on this dialogue often focus on the character of Megilla, who is seen as a virile lesbian with an artificial phallus or as a veritable butch; she has also been seen as a tribas (even though the word does not appear), especially given the context of prostitution. However, none of this is clear from the dialogue itself: Megilla and Demonassa are not prostitutes; they organize a banquet as rich citizens of Athens. In the fiction of the dialogue, Demonassa as well as Megilla is attracted to Leaina. In Greek and Roman representations generally, moreover, prostitution is in no way a privileged context for a lesbian eroticism aimed at a male audience. Finally, their use of a sex toy remains no more than hypothetical.

In actuality, implicit and explicit references to the works of Plato (e.g. the re-employment of the term hetairistria), together with the complicated structure of the dialogue, reveal a complex mise en abîme set up by the author: Leaina, like Lucian, invents a dialogue to please her audience, and introduces, one after the other, topoi, knowing winks, and logical impossibilities. Far from providing access to the realities and representations of “homosexual” women of the imperial public, Lucian constructs a paradoxical symposion: a learned formulation of the kind of thing the orator-sophist must do in order to please and retain his audience. In this fabrication the characters are neither masculine nor feminine; they are simply “different” (allokotos, 5.67), just as Lucian invents a new genre of his own.

This sort of invention in the service of sophistic creation can be found in another of Lucian’s dialogues. The Erotes stages, once again through an inset dialogue, an oratorical competition intended to show which form of erotic desire, eros for boys or for women, is superior. Here, there is no essential difference between the preference for boys or for women, of a kind that would profoundly change the identity of the individual: it is merely a question of personal taste, and Theomnestus, who solicits Lycinus’s opinion on the question, bluntly states that he cannot make a definitive choice. This text clearly shows the nonexistence of the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality in the ancient world.²⁹ It should be noted, however, that, in setting up this comparison of the merits of women and of boys, everything is seen from the perspective of the free man, and sexual love between women never appears as a possible preference that might be defended, whether by the champion of love for women, or the champion of men’s love for boys. When female homoeroticism is evoked, it is at a particular moment in the orators’ sparring. The defender of love for women paints a terrifying picture of a world that accepts relationships between men, and in which women would likewise be authorized to make love to one another: in such a world, women would join together as do men, and lust of the kind associated with tribades would be displayed openly. Here we find gathered together multiple topoi regarding sexual practices: clichés of excess and gender distortion, an explicit reference to a dildo used between women, and mention of a certain Philaenis, known as the author of an erotic handbook (P. Oxy. 2891),who also shares a name with Martial’s character.³⁰ The argument is the following: if relationships between men are to be recognized, Charicles essentially says, then it will likewise be necessary to recognize relationships between women. This statement rests on the implicit idea that sexual relationships between men and sexual relationships between women would belong to a common group, that of relationships between individuals of the same sex, or “homosexuality”. This is the greatest threat that can apparently be wielded in the argument against sexual love for boys. Even so, in the context of this verbal contest, the notion of such a category does not appear plausible, and victory is awarded to Charicles’s adversary, Callicratidas. In this dialogue, in which humorous references to Plato are evident in the parody of male homoerotic relationships, the mention of female homoeroticism is used by Lucian’s character simply as a means of demonstrating which of the other two types of love is better: female homoeroticism is never included in the terms of the comparison³¹ (sunkrisis) and, contrary to Aristophanes’s depiction in Plato’s Symposium, is positioned outside the erotic domain, as something by implication impossible and unthinkable.